The loincloth of cloud had shaken itself out into a flowing robe, from which only the brown skull of the mountain protruded in its white skull-cap.
"There are three of them," announced a nasal voice from the heart of the little crowd.

"A great long chap and two guides." "He can't possibly know that," remarked the mountaineer to me, "but let's hope it is so." "They're as plain as pike-staffs," continued Quinby, whose bent blond head I now distinguished, as he occupied the congenial post of Sister Anne.

"They seem stuck....

No, they're getting up on to the snow-slope, and the front man's cutting steps." "Then they're all right for the present," said the mountaineer.

"It's the getting down that's ticklish." "You can see the rope blowing about between them ...